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The Florence project develops a robot for elderly that provides multiple Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and Lifestyle services with a consistent user-interface. The project success is measured by the acceptance of these services by the user group. Enabling such service robotics in (smart) homes requires a robust and flexible platform to collect, enhance and distribute sensory information; and to manipulate the actuators in the environment. A key characteristic of such an environment is that sensors and actuators are not always available, are distributed, and are mobile (due to e.g. the robot and phone mobility). This dynamicity requires a loose coupling between services and sensors/actuators. The paper describes the design principles and high level architecture of the Florence platform that hides the distribution, availability and mobility aspects from the services, and sketches some challenges that lie ahead.

We exploit the ability to sense and use context information to augment or replace the traditional static security measures by making them more adaptable to a given context and thereby less intrusive. We demonstrate that by fusing location information obtained from various sources that are associated to the user and are available over time, the confidence in the identity of the user can be increased considerably. In fact, the level of confidence in the identity of the user is related to the probability that the user is at a certain location. This probability is used as a measure to parameterize the authentication level of the user making it thereby much more adaptive to changing situational circumstances. In this paper we describe the theoretical background for a context-sensitive adaptation of authentication and the design and validation of the system that we have developed to adaptively authenticate a user on the basis of the location of his sensed identity tokens.

We present an access control architecture that restricts access of train and tourist office services to travelers that are really on the train. For this purpose location and velocity information are used as alternative authentication and authorization credentials. The ambient intelligence of our transparent access control mechanism manifests itself as a pool of verification methods of increasing strengths. These verification methods are based on the proximity principle and relational contextual history information about WLAN access points, fellow train travelers, the train itself and its conductor or driver.

A 4G-environment is based on the integration of 3G mobile and other wired and wireless technologies into an all-IP network environment. Central to such an environment is a 4G-service platform, which offers services such as AAA, mobility management and session control, and also mediates between the users and providers of these services. Each service platform and its associated users, service providers and access networks constitute a service platform domain. Extension of offered functionality and expansion of coverage is obtained by federation between multiple service platform domains. In the 4GPLUS project a conceptual framework is developed for 4G-environments, which specifies the functionality and structure of the 4G-service platform and the concept of federation. Several key aspects of this framework have been refined, implemented and prototyped within this project. This paper provides an overview of the 4G-concepts developed within the project and the main results achieved.

Beyond 3G (B3G) environments typically consist of multi-homed terminals and wireless overlay networks. This paper presents a categorization of IP-level mobility management solutions for B3G environments. Closely observing the mobility requirements of a wide range of possible applications, the paper also motivates the consideration of a new mobility management approach in B3G environments, whereby location management (i.e., reaching mobile end-users at the IP-level for session invitations) is decoupled from handover management (i.e., switching ongoing sessions, collectively or individually, to another access network whenever appropriate). For example, one can use cellular GPRS/UMTS networks for location management and Wi-Fi? or cellular networks for handover management. The paper elaborates upon the merits of such so-called context-aware mobility solutions, which are attained from an optimum use of the mobility management features embedded in the underlying infrastructure.